


Wrongful Things

by Deejaymil



Series: Original Stories by a Bored Australian [7]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Prompt Fic, Romance, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 01:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12829968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Two children walk a grassy lakebed, and the wind watches.





	Wrongful Things

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt fill for: sailboat/romance/battlefield (500 words)

Sunlight bears on the lakebed below, waves of yellow following the sweep of the wind. No longer blue, the lake is green; a swollen bed of grass sprouting from where the remains of the aquatic beings that had once swept overhead now are now nothing but chalk dust and sand and faded hints of fossilised bone. The lake is dry. It’s been dry for decades, and the earth has reclaimed it.

The wind flings across the bump bump bumps dotting that surface. Relentless to press the lakebed flat once more, as it has been since the last desperate water had drained into the thirsty ground. It tosses sand from one side of the lake to the other, pausing midway to heap over the hulking shapes of what had once, much like the fish, travelled above. It tells a story in the way it weaves between hillocks and into furrows. The story told is an old one: look at this place where a battle was fought; here, a mast breaks free of the earth; there, cannonballs are visible as bare smudges in the sand; here, a smaller boat had sunk and rests decidedly upon another, the vines winding around it giving the illusion of phantom sails as the wind tugs at them. The smaller moments—like the colour of those sails—don’t matter, because the wind doesn’t remember them. They’re forgotten.

The wind also snatches at the coats and scarves of those making their way between the greatest hulls. The children, as they are children in the eyes of the ageless wind, huddle closer and travel, one by one in a line of two, deeper into the lake. To where the corpses of wood and iron are thickest and the wind hasn’t managed to bury them yet, their hulls gaping, debris visible within. Into one of these fallen giants the children creep. Like the fieldmouse who now nest where once fish had instead, they’re silent and cautious, always, of dangerous eyes watching. This is a place for ghosts. The wind agrees, wooing them further into the depths of the rotting boat. And they find what they seek. Gloves are shed onto the dusty floor as the children become, not mice, but children once more. They’ve found the whispers of ghosts scratched into the belly of the giant they’re hiding in: two names looped together and a simple _We ain’t wrong_ carved by a long-buried knife held by long-dead hands, but telling a story that the wind cannot.

 _We ain’t wrong,_ the children agree, fingers tracing over the barely visible carving. Splintered and chewed, the words will soon be gone. The story behind the hands that had written it will fade, just like the lake, just like the boats. Just like the children themselves, not really children at all in the eyes of men, but women with set paths to walk.

 _We ain’t wrong,_ those women say, setting their own path and cutting their names into the belly of the boat before slipping away, hand in hand. The wind watches, uncaringly.

In another two hundred years, this moment won’t matter either.


End file.
